http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7247 Scarlett fever gone viral When mega-star Scarlett Johansson signed on to be the famous face of the Israeli soft drink company SodaStream, she was probably unaware of the tsunami it would unleash. In her long-standing role as a goodwill ambassador for the Britain-based global charity Oxfam, Johansson was used to being lauded for fighting […]
In William Manchester’s superb biography of General Douglas MacArthur “American Caesar” there is a very apposite quote from General MacArthur in 1937 when he was confronted by a pacifist Congress:
“The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words….”Too Late:..Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy: too late in realizing the mortal danger; too late in preparedness; too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance; too late in standing with one’s friends.”
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American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880 – 1964 by William Manchester
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/cbs-edits-out-cruzs-criticism-of-obama/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood Actor, and Tommi Trudeau, the Producer of “Groovy Foods.”
The Gang gathered to discuss Malik Obama’s Terrorist Scarf. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 10:20 mark) and analyzed the media’s silence on Obama’s brother wearing a Hamas-related scarf calling for the destruction of Israel.
Does it matter that Obama’s brother wears a Hamas-related scarf calling for the destruction of Israel?
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/soft-pedaling-stalinist-genocide/print/ Max Fisher, foreign affairs blogger for the Washington Post, recently posed “nine questions about Ukraine you were too embarrassed to ask.” Fisher’s answers are informative but someone with a master’s degree in security studies from John Hopkins University, should be embarrassed, or even ashamed, about his account of a crucial part of Ukraine’s. Fisher […]
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-schnee/george-washingtons-spies-how-they-saved-the-american-revolution/print/
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” declared Henry L. Stimson when, as Secretary of State in 1929, he promptly closed the cryptanalysis department of the United States.
Had George Washington been inhibited by such diplomatic niceties, it is likely he would have lost the revolutionary war. This possibility was described by Brian Kilmeade, who cohosts Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox & Friends, when he spoke about his new book “George Washington’s Secret Six-The Spy Ring that Saved the American Revolution” at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club at the Beverly Hills Hotel on January 16th.
During a riveting presentation, Kilmeade described the activities of Washington’s group of disparate patriots who frequently risked certain death over many years in order to secure victory against Great Britain, the world’s only real superpower at the time. Almost nothing was known of them or their activities until a horde of letters was discovered in 1929 and handed over to Long Island’s premier historian, Morton Pennypacker, for study and analysis.
The letters revealed the identities of the Culper Spy Ring. It included Robert Townsend, a Quaker merchant and reporter; Austin Roe, a tavern keeper; Caleb Brewster, a longshoreman who ferried messages between Connecticut and New York; Abraham Woodhull, a Long Island bachelor with business and family reasons for traveling to Manhattan; James Rivington, the owner of a swanky coffeehouse and print shop where high-ranking British Officers congregated to gossip about secret plans and operations; and Agent 355, a woman whose identity is still unknown but who used her charm to coax information out of British officers.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/threatening-for-peace/print/ Secretary of State John Kerry has been repeatedly warning Israel of dire consequences if the current talks with the Palestinians do not lead to a negotiated peace. In November he warned of a third intifada on Israeli TV. And on Sunday at the Munich Security Conference, Kerry had this to say: Today’s status quo, absolutely to a certainty, I […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Groundhog Day is the long eternal tragedy of Islam, which always sees its shadow and always ends up with six weeks, six months or six hundred years of more winter. That hopeful time when the bitter cold of winter begins its slow transition into the warmth and renewal of spring never comes for Islam.
In a reversal of the cycle of season, the Arab Spring led to the Islamic Winter, but that is the endless pattern of Islamic attempts at reform and rejuvenation, which rather than finding renewal in their attempts at transformation only go on perpetuating the same cycle of violence, tyranny and oppression.
There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.
The film Groundhog Day showed us a man who was doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he learned to use his time to become a better person. Islam has been stuck in its own form of that cycle, repeating the same few decades over and over again, moving from religious ecstasy to holy war, seeking redemption through religious tyranny and Jihad, and finding that there was no escaping the internal decay and instability in the veins of the religion.
Islam’s only redemption is in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence, led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of the same.
The Islamic leaders of one generation endorse the tyrants whom the Islamic leaders of another generation strive to overthrow. Hardly had Mohammed kicked the bucket than his nearest and dearest were fighting a civil war over supreme rulership. The origins of the Shiite-Sunni split lay not in theology, but in a vulgar power play between Mohammed’s son in law and his father in law’s clan. That greedy infighting has hardened into theological variations, but the real split is what Muslim wars are always really about, money and power.
Over a thousand years later the Muslim world is still dedicating all its energies to civil wars and external conflicts whose only true goal is to put money and power into the hands of its leaders. The confrontations between the prominent Persian Shiite families running Iran and the Arab Sunni families running the Arabian gulf states are not theological, though they take place under the guise of theology. They are ethnic and economic conflicts dressed up as religious conflicts.
The ugliest elements of Islam, its bigotry toward Jews and Christians, its endless Razzia raids, its need to remove the faintest doubt about the parentage of the children of its women, are pure tribal pettiness distilled into religion by warlords and clan leaders whose understanding of theology did not extend beyond personal power.
http://www.steynonline.com/6067/al-gore-contemplates-the-inconceivable
Barry Rubin, a great strategic thinker and cartographer of the emerging post-American world, died today in Tel Aviv. I read him regularly and cited him in After America re the collectively insane urge of almost everyone Nidal Hasan encountered as he wafted upwards through the US Army to look the other way and not see what was staring them in the face:
As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in US history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave it to a roomful of fellow army psychiatrists and doctors – some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And, when the question of whether then Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic”, the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents”.
I remember when I read Rubin’s line about the PowerPoint presentation. Many of us had been groping in the same direction, but he was the one who came up with the perfect, piercing image for the madness that was going on. He did that a lot, right up to the end. Rest in peace.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370259/print
Obama’s global fantasies are falling to earth along with him.
In the last two weeks, we learned that Bashar Assad has dismantled only 5 percent of his WMD arsenal, despite President Obama’s soaring rhetoric to the contrary. Russia violated a long-observed agreement with the U.S. about testing missiles. Iran’s take on the negotiations over its bomb program bears no resemblance to our interpretation. Chinese officials now happily leak fantastic stories about using their military to punish Japan. All that is trumped by veiled threats from the Sunni Gulf monarchies, terrified of Iran, to buy a bomb or two from Pakistan. We hear other rumors that even China thinks the new leadership in North Korea is unhinged and is not worried about friendly warnings from Beijing.
Whether all these incidents are minor or serious, and whether they are random or interconnected and perceived as proof of the loss of U.S. deterrence, depends on which particular bad actor is studying them to try to guess whether the Obama administration will do anything should a provocateur start a war or attempt to redraw a regional map.
In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth.
The Dreyfus Affair, which splintered French society of the fin de siècle and continued to divide it well into the 20th century, began on the morning of Oct. 15, 1894, with the arrest for high treason of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old artillery officer, a high-ranking graduate of the elite École Polytechnique and […]
